Erik de Ruiter

Is Generative AI the Digital Tower of Babel? Pride Comes Before a Fall

Imagine a mysterious disease ravaging a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. The brains of those affected degenerate rapidly, and scientists soon discover the cause—a ritual in which the dead are consumed. This disease, later known as Kuru, spreads as the tribe literally ate themselves. Now, decades later, we see a similar phenomenon in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). No, our computers haven’t started eating each other (thank goodness!), but something disturbing is happening: Generative AI systems (hereinafter simply AI for readability) are increasingly “consuming” their own output, with potentially disastrous consequences. Welcome to the world of 'model collapse' and 'shitification' - two-dollar words for a multi-billion dollar problem.

AI-ethics: Does every organization need an ethics officer?

Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" outlines a dystopian vision of the future in which a few individuals can predict crimes before they happen. Interesting, but what if these predictions are wrong, as happened in the film on occasion? These kinds of questions are now commonplace outside of Hollywood. Thanks to advanced computer technology, increasingly sophisticated algorithms are being developed. The past decade has taught us that risk in its application has not always received the attention it needed in hindsight. For example, "Follow The Money" recently revealed that until 2015, the Dutch police used an algorithm that estimated the risk of criminal behavior based in part on ethnicity.